Hi Dave, >I'm not a programmer, but I am deeply involved in Macintosh computers. >It's my understanding that Carbon apps are not able to take advantage of >OSX multithreading, long filenames, better performance, and other nifty >features that OSX has to offer.
This isn't really true, except to the extent that a Carbon app which is designed to offer the same functionality on OS 9 and OS X will not be able to take advantage of OSX-only features. There is an increasing tendency for Carbon applications to be OSX-only. The boundaries between Carbon and Cocoa can also be blurred by the fact that Carbon applications may use Cocoa APIs and vice versa. Carbon apps can certainly take advantage of everything you list. Your quoted text seems to have been taken from a Macrumors forum. It's not an informed opinion. There is nothing to prevent Apple from adapting Carbon and Cocoa APIs to run on different processors, and Cocoa programs will have to be recompiled if this happens, just like Carbon programs. This has actually happened in the past: Carbon's predecessor (the classic Mac OS) was rewritten to run on PowerPC processors, and Cocoa's predecessor (NextStep / OpenStep) was rewritten to run on x86 processors. Applications had to be rewritten and recompiled on both occasions. Best wishes, Jeremy
